Phillips Exeter Academy Class of 1980

In this morning’s e-mail, from Harold Brown at the alumni office:

…I thought you might be interested to know how your alma mater has responded. A week ago at the opening of school Assembly Acting Principal Tom Hassan outlined plans for PEA’s response to Hurricane Katrina. This morning at Assembly he informed the PEA community that 5 students from the gulf region (3 from New Orleans, 2 from Gulfport, MS) were enrolled today. The announcement and the ensuing introductions inspired a heartening and thunderous standing ovation. Faces were glistening with smiles and tears. This was a wonderful Exeter moment!

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In case you were wondering where the site went today, there was a large power outage in Los Angeles this afternoon. Some details over at my site and, here’s the L.A. times coverage.

Two million customers were affected before most power was restored about 2 p.m. During the blackout, elevators stalled, traffic lights either went out or burned steadily green, and teachers tried to soothe worried schoolchildren.

The outage hit about 12:45 p.m.. Lee Sapaden, a spokesman for the county’s Office of Emergency Management, said the massive power failure was caused after an employee “inadvertently cut a power cable” at a DWP substation in West L.A.

More photos from the 25th reunion, from Dan Oakley. Thanks, Dan!

Click here to view or here for slideshow.

It’s almost the end of summer, and Charlotte would like to hear from you…

Dear friends,

After a short summer spent recovering from the hoarse voice I got at the reunion from having so many great conversations, it’s now time again to write to you to ask for any tidbit of news you might like to share. Please help!!!! I’m hoping that some of you who didn’t make it to the reunion will update me, and that those of you who did will remind me of any important facts, so I don’t get things backwards when I try to recall . . . new job? . . . new house? . . . new baby?

Thanks!

Your correspondent,
Charlotte Breed Handy `80

breedhandy ( at ) msn ( dot ) com

On our end, we had a great family trip to London and Paris this summer. I’d meant to look up Betty Carey as I think she lives near the hotel where we stayed, but got distracted by the second bombing on the London Underground, and we moved on to Paris after only a few days. Haven’t gotten around to writing up much of that yet, other than our excursion to the Louvre.

A brief article in today’s Wall Street Journal notes that it’s been a year since Paul Klebnikov ‘81 was killed in Moscow, just after starting the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, in what appears to have been a professional assassination. The case remains unsolved.

I hadn’t seen Paul in years when I heard the news while travelling in Asia last summer. I was jetlagged and had flipped on the BBC at 3 or 4 in the morning just as the story was being covered, which was simultaneously jarring and surreal. I thought back to many debates / arguments with Paul, Tony Gardner, Greg Daniels, and Justin D’Armes over otherwise forgettable dining hall meals at Exeter, and was thinking that Paul had probably written or said something brilliant but really annoying to the wrong people in Russia.

A group of journalists have started a project to continue the investigation, at Project Klebnikov.
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